Thursday, November 28, 2013

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is disgusted that Malcom Turnbull is doing nothing to rein in the Leftist excesses of the ABC

Public broadcaster demands licence to be vile

Andrew Bolt

I am not a fan of defamation proceedings, but I’m far less impressed by an ABC now so out of control that it vilifies conservative critics and spends taxpayers’ money defending its right to call them “dog f...ers”:

Lawyers for Chris Kenny, a journalist and commentator with The Australian and Sky News, have lodged a statement of claim in the NSW Supreme Court against the ABC, Chaser presenter Andrew Hansen and production company Giant Dwarf for images and words broadcast on September 11 that referred to Kenny as “a dog f . . ker"…

The statement of claim also alleges the imputation the plaintiff’s “attacks on the ABC were so dishonorable . . . that he deserved to be compared to . . . a person who has sexual intercourse with a dog”.

Kenny is claiming aggravated damages, a permanent restraint on any future publication of the same or similar material and interest, plus costs.

I have never known the ABC to be so stridently partisan and so abusive of conservative critics. It has betrayed its charter and abused the trust - and taxes - of taxpayers.

Former director of the ABC Board who appointed Mark Scott calls for his resignation

Janet Albrechtsen

The seriousness of the ABC's decision to publish criminally obtained information that involved such profoundly damaging and entirely foreseeable risks also raises questions about the ABC board.

Did Scott raise the issue with the board, to whom he is responsible? If not, why not? What about ABC chairman Jim Spigelman? Was he included in the decision? If not, why not? If yes, did he consider the ramifications for the public interest?

What is Spigelman's view about Scott's response to questions in senate estimates last week that it was in the public interest to reveal information about Australian intelligence gathering in Indonesia even though he knew that it would "cause some difficulties with the Australian-Indonesian relationship in the short term". Or did Spigelman do what former ABC chairmen lacking spine have too often done - let the MD and therefore the staff - run the show without prudent board oversight?

So far, the only public comment Spigelman has made has been a letter to The Australian about the "considerable personal distress" this newspaper caused to his executive assistant by publishing an incorrect salary figure. Compared with the breach of national security perpetrated by the ABC, his focus on a matter of staff welfare is a disappointing demonstration of where the chairman's priorities lie. A responsible board must surely have concerns about Scott's stewardship of the ABC on this matter. Scott is appointed by and subject to removal by the board.

As section 13 of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act sets out, the managing director holds office subject to terms and conditions determined by the board. The reckless publication of criminally obtained information with the predictable and escalating consequences now unfolding make his position untenable. In short, the ABC board needs to look at its responsibilities here - and its culpability in this matter.

As a member of the ABC board for five years between 2005 and 2010, I can attest to the fact that it has a disappointing history of being ineffective. I can attest to the fact that information that ought to have been provided to the board was not.

And I can attest to the fact that, unlike commercial boards that work together, the ABC board is too often a numbers game. If you don't have the board numbers then the status quo at the ABC becomes untouchable. Moreover, if the chairman's main aim is to be loved by staff, then the MD is untouchable.

Instead of providing genuine oversight and counsel to management, the board gets bogged down drafting policies, codes of conduct and other fine-sounding documents. It's a management driven make-work gig for board members to make them feel important. It justifies them jumping on planes, travelling business class, checking into nice hotels and turning up for a fine lunch at Ultimo - all at taxpayer expense. Meanwhile the focus is taken off what really matters - the output of the ABC. The output this past week by the ABC has let taxpayers down. Badly.

There’s not much point in calling into question the judgment of the Prime Minister, and his chief pollster, without calling into question the judgment of the people who started this conflagration [with Indonesia], Katharine Viner, the editor The Guardian Australia, and Mark Scott, the managing director of the ABC.

They made their decision to publish in the ‘’public interest’’, in the full knowledge that it would poison the relationship between Indonesia and Australia, damage Australia’s intelligence gathering, humiliate Yudhoyono and his wife, reinvigorate the people-smuggling trade, goad Indonesian nationalists, give fodder to Islamist xenophobia, and compromise Australia’s trade with Indonesia…

The arguments in favour of publishing the spying leaks are obvious: that the truth will prevent government security agencies from excessive zeal, and the public has a right to know what is being done in its name. It is a strong argument, and I respect it.

But the public interest test can be rigorously contested in this case. The truth is something we all navigate every day, so as not to give offence or create enmity. Governments do the same. Yet neither Viner nor Scott has bothered to enunciate how, in the ‘’public interest’’, the positives outweigh the negatives. They have, with Abbott and the spooks, joint ownership of the toxins flowing through the relationship. And neither has come close to justifying their actions.

I read the DM daily and admire its courage so this could be good -- JR

IN a major shake-up of the Australian digital news market the world's biggest English-language news site Daily Mail Online has teamed with Nine Entertainment Co's digital arm Mi9 to launch a local edition early in the new year.

The deal, which was 3 1/2 months in the making, was unveiled in Sydney this morning by Mail Online publisher and editor-in-chief Martin Clarke and Mi9 boss Mark Britt, who predicted the new site would quickly become Australia's top digital news brand.

"It is our strategy to make Mail Online and Daily Mail a global news brand and this fits into our strategy," said Mr Clarke. "Our track record speaks for itself. We've succeeded in the UK, we've succeeded in the US, and I have no reason to believe we won't succeed here.

"It's an opportunity that has come along thanks to Ninemsn and we're delighted to be able to take advantage of it. "

Daily Mail Online is the second British news group to launch a major digital play in Australia following the launch of the Guardian Australia website six months ago.

Internationally the Mail is by far the bigger player with 57 million users internationally per month, about one million of them from Australia.

With about 2.6 million visitors a month, Mi9's Ninemsn was Australia's third-largest news site in November after News Corp's news.com.au (with 2.9 million) and Fairfax Media's smh.com.au (with 2.8 million).

"There's been this great ongoing battle for the last five years on who the national No.1 news site is in Australia ... between news.com.au and the Sydney Morning Herald and the Nine news site," said Mr Britt.

"All of us sit at around 2.7m to 3m unique visitors a month in an audience population of 17m and an audience population on news sites of 10m. So none of us in that context are actually reaching yet true mass market mainstream news."

In contrast to the strategies of leading local news providers News Corp (publisher of The Australian) and Fairfax Media, which have both started charging for their online content, Daily Mail Australia will be free.

"We've made the decision globally to keep Mail Online free. We are going very nakedly for a scale play," Mr Clarke said. "We expect this thing to be profitable pretty quickly. We see this as a very positive financial model."

Mr Britt said the migration of readers from print to digital consumption of news "has only just started" and was "probably going to accelerate". "As more user behaviour moves online . . . we're in a growing market for the online consumption of news," he said.

"We absolutely see a complementary space for Nine News, which is currently the leading video-based news service in Australia, and the Daily Mail, with their traditional text based format."

"Also, we're not partisan. We don't have a dog in anyone's fight. I think people might find us refreshingly straight," he said.

"We don't edit with an agenda. It's not a question of positioning ourselves to the left or the right of anyone."

The Daily Mail Australia site will be integrated into the Ninemsn suite of sites and its newsroom will sit alongside but separate to the existing Nine team headed by Hal Crawford.

"On the commercial side the Daily Mail site will be sold by the Mi9 sales team and will continue to use all the data and the technology that we use for the monetisation of all the rest of the Mi9 network," said Mr Britt.

Editor candidates are currently being interviewed and the new site would go on to hire about 50 journalists.

"I would envisage producing the first original Australian content very soon in the new year and we will gradually ramp it up as fast as we can recruit journalists to produce it," Mr Clarke said.

"Once we have the content we will be launching an Australian-facing home page that will be the digital destination for Australian visitors to Mail Online. And we'll keep making it richer and richer and richer as we get more journalists coming online.

"I would expect our Australian team to break good Australian exclusives."

The site's existing audience in Britain and the US was "pretty upmarket, slightly more female-leaning than male, highly educated and usually a young demographic, in their 20s and 30s", he said.

No comments:

Background

Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.

Most academics are lockstep Leftists so readers do sometimes doubt that I have the qualifications mentioned above. Photocopies of my academic and military certificates are however all viewable here

For overseas readers: The "ALP" is the Australian Labor Party -- Australia's major Leftist party. The "Liberal" party is Australia's major conservative political party.

In most Australian States there are two conservative political parties, the city-based Liberal party and the rural-based National party. But in Queensland those two parties are amalgamated as the LNP.

Again for overseas readers: Like the USA, Germany and India, Australia has State governments as well as the Federal government. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).

For American readers: A "pensioner" is a retired person living on Social Security

"Digger" is an honorific term for an Australian soldier

Another lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Another bit of Australian: Any bad writing or messy anything was once often described as being "like a pakapoo ticket". In origin this phrase refers to a ticket written with Chinese characters - and thus inscrutably confusing to Western eyes. These tickets were part of a Chinese gambling game called "pakapoo".

Two of my ancestors were convicts so my family has been in Australia for a long time. As well as that, all four of my grandparents were born in the State where I was born and still live: Queensland. And I am even a member of the world's second-most condemned minority: WASPs (the most condemned is of course the Jews -- which may be why I tend to like Jews). So I think I am as Australian as you can get. I certainly feel that way. I like all things that are iconically Australian: meat pies, Vegemite, Henry Lawson etc. I particularly pride myself on my familiarity with the great Australian slanguage. I draw the line at Iced Vo-Vos and betting on the neddies, however. So if I cannot comment insightfully on Australian affairs, who could?

My son Joe

On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!

I am an army man. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies or mining companies

Although I have been an atheist for all my adult life, I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak.

The Rt. Rev. Phil Case (Moderator of the Presbyterian church in Queensland) is a Pharisee, a hypocrite, an abomination and a "whited sepulchre".

English-born Australian novellist, Patrick White was a great favourite in literary circles. He even won a Nobel prize. But I and many others I have spoken to find his novels very turgid and boring. Despite my interest in history, I could only get through about a third of his historical novel Voss before I gave up. So why has he been so popular in literary circles? Easy. He was a miserable old Leftist coot, and, incidentally, a homosexual. And literary people are mostly Leftists with similar levels of anger and alienation from mainstream society. They enjoy his jaundiced outlook, his dissatisfaction, rage and anger.

Would you believe that there once was a politician whose nickname was "Honest"? "Honest" Frank Nicklin M.M. was a war hero, a banana farmer and later the conservative Premier of my home State of Queensland in the '60s. He was even popular with the bureaucracy and gave the State a remarkably tranquil 10 years during his time in office. Sad that there are so few like him.

Revered Labour Party leader Gough Whitlam was a very erudite man so he cannot have been unaware of the similarities of his famous phrase “the Party, the platform, the people” with an earlier slogan: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer". It's basically the same slogan in reverse order.

Australia's original inhabitants were a race of pygmies, some of whom survived into modern times in the mountainous regions of the Atherton tableland in far North Queensland. See also here. Below is a picture of one of them taken in 2007, when she was 105 years old and 3'7" tall

Julia Gillard, a failed feminist flop. She was given the job of Prime Minister of Australia but her feminist preaching was so unpopular that she was booted out of the job by her own Leftist party. Her signature "achievements" were the carbon tax and the mining tax, both of which were repealed by the next government.

The "White Australia Policy: "The Immigration Restriction Act was not about white supremacy, racism, or the belief that whites were higher up the evolutionary tree than the coloured races. Rather, it was designed to STOP the racist exploitation of non-whites (all of whom would have been illiterate peasants practicing religions and cultures anathema to progressive democracy) being conscripted into a life of semi-slavery in a coolie-worked plantation economy for the benefit of the absolute monarchs, hereditary aristocracy and the super-wealthy companies and share-holders of the northern hemisphere.

A great little kid

In November 2007, a four-year-old boy was found playing in a croc-infested Territory creek after sneaking off pig hunting alone with four dogs and a puppy. The toddler was found five-and-a-half hours after he set off from his parents' house playing in a creek with the puppy. Amazingly, Daniel Woditj also swam two creeks known to be inhabited by crocs during his adventurous romp. Mr Knight said that after walking for several kilometres, Daniel came to a creek and swam across it. Four of his dogs "bailed up" at the creek but the youngster continued on undaunted with his puppy to a second creek. Mr Knight said Daniel swam the second croc-infested creek and walked on for several more kilometres. "Captain is a hard bushman and Daniel is following in his footsteps. They breed them tough out bush."

A great Australian: His eminence George Pell. Pictured in devout company before his elevation to Rome

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here